Hey guys. I am a 22 year-old college student who majored in Electrical Engineering, but has switched majors because the career path wasn’t for me at all. I was planning to switch over to the CS department in my school, but due to two F grades in my transcript they denied my transfer. Because of this I was planning to transfer over to another school with a CS program, but with my GPA being slightly below the transfer GPA requirement for that school I’m pretty much a sitting duck in my current school. I started learning Python and started on FCC to at least have an idea as to what coding is before starting to take CS courses, but I feel like I might not end up with a degree since my options for raising my GPA are VERY limited. I’m 4 years into college already, but I just want to have a decent job already . I’m thinking about starting as a web developer (either front-end or full stack), and then maybe lean towards app development or software development. However, I honestly feel as though if I drop out of school now my path to landing a good job in web development might become more rocky (or impossible to accomplish). Do you guys have any advice as to how I could be able to overcome this situation, and if it’s best to continue going to school knowing the situation that I am in?
P.S.: I am ready, willing, and able to work hard on learning code and landing a job. This is more of actually landing the degree or not.
How many semesters before you finish your engineering degree? It sounds like you are almost done. If so, its not worth starting all over again to learn something you can do for free and on your own time (freeCodeCamp). At least try and finish what you started, I’m sure there are other jobs you can do with a degree like that if you really don’t want an electrical engineering job. You can start learning how to code now, get a job somewhere once you graduate, then finish up freeCodeCamp until you can get a software job. If you start now, you could get a junior front-end job in as little as 4 months.
TL;DR
If you are almost done, finish your degree, get a job you can do temporarily while you learn to code, then move on to a software job when you feel confident. Many people on this site have switched careers in only a couple of months. You’ll figure it out.
Cheers
P.S. I’m a college student who felt the same way you did in my junior year. Fortunately, I started FCC in November of 2019, and plan on finishing in May of this year before I graduate. If I can do it, you can too
Welcome to the community @JayX97. I must assure you that even if you dropped out of school - that is not the end of life. If you really have passion for coding then I will suggest you switch to coding but seems to me that you’re almost done, then try completing your studies.
That’s true. It’s possible to get work without a degree, but it’s much harder.
Speak to your academic advisor. Send them an email to schedule a phone/video call. (As awkward as it is, you will have much more success with a real conversation than an email exchange.) Talk to them about your options. If you are going to transfer to a CS program, you are going to need to pass those required classes. It is possible that you can replace your Fs with your new grades. In my experience, you usually need to negotiate that with your professor and department in advance, but sometimes there are ways to do it after the fact.
When you retake the courses, it’s your new grades that will matter. It’s not uncommon to have to retake a class. Your old grades will bring your average down, but you can’t change the past. Every A you get now brings the average up.
Bring your grades up from this point on. Even if your overall GPA is still not great, being able to talk about having gotten your act together and turned things around is a strong point when you interview.
You need to figure out why your grades aren’t what they should be and take actual steps to address it. Do you need to take fewer classes per semester? Do you need to re-take or audit some foundational classes that you didn’t really understand? Are you making use of professor office hours and the free tutoring that your school offers? There are probably someone at your school whose full time job is to help students figure out how to be more successful. Find that person.
An EE degree is fine. It’s a STEM degree in a “related field”. I work with a fair number of people with degrees in EE, CE, Physics, and Math. You can get a job as a developer without transferring to the CS department (not to discourage you from doing so). Start taking programming classes. Even if you’ve already done all of your electives, take a programming class and do well in it. If you are applying for jobs as an EE major with a not-great GPA, you want a good number of rock-solid CS courses to show that this is really what you’re here for.
If you transfer to another school you will probably be in school for another 3 years. Universities have a minimum number of credits that you must take at their school. Also, you will probably have to re-take any required courses that you got less than a B in (or a C, depending on how important it is to your new major). – I have lots of first-hand experience with this because I transferred schools with about 140 credit hours and a 3.9 GPA and had to put in 3 years at the new school.
The people here are great, and we’ll really try to give you the best advice we can, but you really need to sit down with your transcripts, your degree requirements, your finances, and figure out what your options are, what you need to do in particular scenarios and what you realistically can do in those scenarios. Work with your academic advisor and an anyone else relevant at your school.
Your situation is far from unrecoverable, but it sounds like it’s time to get real about making an actual plan and doing the difficult, awkward, and embarrassing things necessary to make it work.
You should complete your degree if you’re only a few credits short, otherwise, you really lost out on a 4-year investment. Having a degree helps you pass some automated screening tools, and it kind of prove some basic competence that you are capable of completing a higher education curriculum, even if your degree is unrelated to the job.
However, regardless of your decision, you should sit down and honestly evaluate yourself, by yourself or with someone that’s not afraid to give you criticism. Examine things like why your GPA is less than desirable and why it took you so long to figure out your major is not for you, because the root of those thing can impact you further in your life if you never figure them out.
Speaking from experience as someone that switched career post graduation and gone through a period of rot, there is a gap between saying and believing that you are ready and willing to work hard and being ready and willing to work hard. The sooner you identify and correct what is causing the gap, the faster you move on to actually working.
In a lot of ways, self-learning is more challenging than school-learning, and a lot of it is the extra layer of management that comes with it. It takes a certain level of discipline and mental toughness to maintain progress and keep yourself accountable. So really keep that in mind, when you’re weighing your options
i spent 2 and a half years doing prerequisites in college because I didn’t know what I want to do during high school. In regards to progress towards the degree, I FAR from completing the EE curriculum lol,. I took 4 courses so far out of the 20 I had to do, and failed two courses twice.
@ArielLeslie@psychometry Thanks you guys for the helpful replies. Again I only took the first five courses out of the twenty-something from the curriculum. I was under an academic contract, and I had to breach the contract because i was failing in the course I was supposed to take that semester. So with the breach in contract I was essentially kicked out of EE (now undeclared). Since my GPA isn’t far from the transfer GPA of the school I’m transferring to I was planning to retake a math course, since I had a C in that course, in hopes that my GPA can reach the transfer GPA.
. I’m thinking about starting as a web developer (either front-end or full stack), and then maybe lean towards app development or software development. However, I honestly feel as though if I drop out of school now my path to landing a good job in web development might become more rocky (or impossible to accomplish). Do you guys have any advice as to how I could be able to overcome this situation, and if it’s best to continue going to school knowing the situation that I am in?
